With a quick spritz of hemlock and a generous dash of cyanide, representatives of the nation’s sickos proudly confirmed Monday that they’d just put the finishing touches on this year’s batch of Halloween candy poison.

Since the nation’s mothers first dreamt up this sort of nightmare in the late seventies, psychopaths, malcontents, and loonies alike have made a regular fall tradition out of injecting tasteless, odorless toxins into millions of fun- sized candy bars; handing them to unsuspecting trick-or-treaters with a subtly deranged grin.

“We’ve had to up the potency just about every year now,” said California sicko James Pritchett, “The candy stays about the same size, but the kids keep getting bigger and bigger.”

Though Pritchett declined to reveal the full contents of his signature toxic cocktail, he agreed to give the gist of his recipe.
“I try to stick with a fresh mix of local, seasonal toxins. Polonium runoff from the plant down the way has really become a staple for me in recent years—though I’m starting to try my hand at homebrew mercury, too!”

The hardest part, according to Pritchett, is getting the proportions just right. “You never want the kid to know what got him sick, so you can’t have anything too fast-acting in there, like batrachotoxin. But you don’t want to have to wait until Christmas for them to kick the bucket, either, so dimethylmercury is out too.”

At press time, the nation’s mothers were parading their children happily through Party City, having finally convinced themselves that this exact scenario was nothing more than an urban legend.